A book that breaks the silence. A unique narrative voice that describes from within and with irony the power dynamics of this organization.

Marina has a role assigned from Eternity: to become a saint according to the guidelines of Opus Dei and to fully dedicate herself to the institution. However, for this young woman, it is not easy to reconcile celibacy and the strict demands of her divine vocation with the problems of any other millennial: the crisis of adolescence, job insecurity, and an urgent need to get Meg Ryan’s exact haircut.

Born into a family linked to the organization, the protagonist of La Obra discovers the world around her through an innocent gaze, but as she grows and the clashes between the outside world and her beliefs intensify, her personality begins to split between her real self and her Opus self, forcing her to live between two irreconcilable worlds.

In this coming-of-age narrative nonfiction, the author portrays in the first person how Opus Dei works from the inside through everyday episodes and ironically shows the manipulation, psychological abuse, and consequences of her twenty-five years immersed in the ecosystem of this ultraconservative Catholic group.

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“The numerary encourages you to encourage your friends to go to the club and encourages you to pray more, fight more, strive more, and write down your childhood sins in a notebook. (...)

My little agenda from when I was ten or eleven has Winnie The Pooh with his famous honey pot on the cover. (...) When Dad brings honey from Ahedo del Butrón, the village in Burgos where we spend the summers, I lick my lips like Winnie. Then, I do the examination of conscience at night sitting on my bed and write down that ‘I have been gluttonous’ because I ate three pieces of bread with honey for a snack, instead of the two I had promised Jesus. Not only am I going to get fat, which is not so important (after all, that would be vanity), but I have failed God in that small, so small mortification that I could make at ten years old to collaborate with redemption.

The numeraries at the club were not terrifying, far from it. They were girls between twenty and thirty years old, celibate and lively, who spent their afternoons making plans for us: they were what I aspired to be, they were what God had asked them to be, and although they had given their lives to God, they did not resemble nuns, but their style was more like María Pombo’s.”